A full recap, hopefully updated periodically. Current as of: October 14, 2010

The following list counts the number of times a player has defeated the sitting world number one men's singles player at the time of their match. Currently, 205 players have defeated the world number one a total of 449 times.

The last player to defeat a world number one was Nikolay Davydenko. He defeated Rafael Nadal at Doha in 2011. This was Davydenko's 4th win of a sitting #1.

Of course this list is biased towards players that were not #1 for a long time themselves.

Becker was only #1 for 12 weeks given him a lot of matches against reigning #1's. Nadal is very impressive at 13 already, but will stagnate now he could be #1 himself for a long time. Lendl may be the most impressive in this list since for over 5 years during his prime he couldn't face the #1, certainly more impressive than Becker. Federer has a serious problem for this statistic, during his prime either he or Nadal was #1 which doesn't help his count. Murray could follow Becker's path here.

It would be nice to have a list of the winning % against reigning #1's.

I'm going to work on a more detailed version of this post-- winning %s, particularly low ranked victories, and I'll try the age thing (though that might take a little longer). I'll need a few days though.

I'm going to work on a more detailed version of this post-- winning %s, particularly low ranked victories, and I'll try the age thing (though that might take a little longer). I'll need a few days though.

the funny thing about this stat is that the more wins you have, the less time in your career you have been n°1.
Nadal will probably not improve before one or two years, maybe never.
Murray, on the other hand, will have plenty of times to improve, Djokovic too.

Hi again! I got curious about this and like with Challengers, Futures tournaments I copied No.1 Matches into a database. After getting rid of the errors we got the numbers right finally. Still, there's a couple of players where I disagree:
* I count Rosset with 3, not 2: Olympics '92, DC vs. USA '92, AMS Paris '96
* Magnus Norman is listed twice. The one with 5 wins, should be Magnus Larsson. (I can see they are easy confused)
* I couldn't find any wins by these: Mike Bauer, Francisco Gonzalez and Jakob Hlasek.
* Walkover doesn't usually count as win, then Clement has only 1 I think.

Since I've also got data, I can provide quite a few stats, but not age stats.